When you post User Content to the Site, you authorize and direct us to make such copies thereof as we deem necessary in order to facilitate the posting and storage of the User Content on the Site. By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing. You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content. Facebook does not assert any ownership over your User Content; rather, as between us and you, subject to the rights granted to us in these Terms, you retain full ownership of all of your User Content and any intellectual property rights or other proprietary rights associated with your User Content.

New Terms:

2.1 For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (“IP content”), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (“IP License”). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account (except to the extent your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it).

So… NOW if you share you upload your photos you are inherently sharing them with others. So if you leave it will not be deleted and you still have no rights to it.

Cody said,

Well, if you read right after the bolded section of the Terms Of Service, it also retains backups.

Also, when it says “except to the extent your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it),” that would still apply under the old ToS. If you post a picture, for example, and someone downloads it/saves it/etc., and you delete that photo from facebook, the copy they saved/downloaded/whatever will still exist.

The key difference is that under the old terms that their license ends when you delete the content. Under the new terms, even if you delete it, they retain full rights to it if you shared it with anyone… which is the norm for an upload. How many unshared photo libraries do you have?